The filmmakers intended to shoot on location in Denton, Texas, but production screeched to a halt in 1980 when the Screen Actors Guild went on strike.Just knowing this movie is made after the town of Denton Texas makes this worth while. Denton, Denton, Texas is the next county over from my county;, Collin County. When we first moved here to McKinney in 1994 we traveled allot around Texas and we went to Denton every once and a while. It had a strange attraction to it, and the people seamed overly friendly and put offish at the same time. Weird in other words, but in a good way.My wife was thinking about going to college there back in 1994. We hung out there for a while and checked out the college. It seemed to invite you to like Denton at the same time push you away. I can not believe how much Shock Treatment reminds me of the movie True Stories. I wonder if some of the same people were involved in the making of both movies? I wonder if True Stories was modeled after Shock Treatment? True Stories is 100 times a better finer quality movie though. The sound quality in True Stories is the best I have ever heard in a great rock and roll based movie.

I put off watching this for a very long time and now I'm kicking myself for it. While not a Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel, this film does feature several characters from the film portrayed by different actors and several Rocky Horror Picture Show actors portraying new characters. Somehow, Brad and Janet become the stars of a bizarre TV network and wackiness ensues. The new Brad & Janet are terrible singers but it's a decent movie. Little Nell looks amazing in this, that's all I could think about while I watched this.Well,that and....Hey that's Rik Mayall!!! It's sad to think Rik is dead now and Nell looks dead. If you like Rocky Horror Picture Show,you have to see this.If you don't like RHPS,you must avoid this.

If you want to know what it is pure television you have to watch that sequel of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was done for television and constantly remindS you of the fact.The whole action takes place in the Denton TV studio. It is the story of a television show that changes sponsors. The new sponsor has to diabolize the older sponsor and to push forward a new icon for the new sponsor that creates at first a link with the older one. Hence they diabolize the older sponsor as some kind of emotional misfit and use his wife as the new icon. They will even reveal in the end that the new sponsor is in fact the twin brother of the older one. And there we have a basic simple primitive if not even simplistic theme that goes back to the oldest layers of prehistory, the conflict between two brothers, what's more twin brothers. Better than Abel and Cain. And this wife of the older sponsor will bring sight to the blind anchor man of the show. Isn't that divine and angelic and beautiful? Then it uses language as some kind of mesmerizing fascinating hypnotizing whip to make you get in line with the game. The rhyming patterns are so simple that they seem to be like the drums of some voodoo dance with a lot of Hollywood sauce on top and a simplistic comic flavour underneath. You are the pronged cattle taken up and tied up in that caravan, carnival, canned mental emptiness. And the main catch letter to your ears and eyes is F. F mind you like in the most famous four letter word in English, and yet it is five Fs in one motto. Farley Flavors' Fabulous Fast Foods that becomes in the mouth of some TV announcer: "First and Foremost, Farley Flavors' Fabulous Fast Foods Feed and Fortify Families For a Fabulous Future." From five to thirteen, from the devil to the witch, from the pentacle to the worst omen possible on earth. Be repetitive and you will always reach the bottom of hell and the dire straits or purgatory. But don't expect to find heaven in commercial repetitiveness.But the point is that this show, this film, this TV film, this film about TV and this film at the local TV station does not in the least try to make you think. It is here only to whirl you around into a maelstrom out of which you cannot escape. And don't believe there are good ones and bad ones. There are only old ones and new ones and new ones are neither better nor worse than old ones. They have only one aim which is to make you be a robotic un-thinker, a mechanized non-thinker, a motorized anti-thinker.That's the kind of rapport TV wants to establish with its audience: all-sensorial, hypnotic, non-mental acceptance of the show as good or the same all-sensorial, hypnotic, non-mental rejection of the show as bad. You like or don't like but you sure don't have to think about it. It is all at the level of your kinetic and kinesthetic, kinesiological primary response at the essentially physiological level of your being, what they justly call the "id" in the show, with Freud's picture somewhere lost in that mess.The only link with the Rocky Horror Picture Show is in fact in the flimsy vision of Grant Wood's painting known as American Gothic. But that is a cliché, nothing else, not even a wink.And be sure this TV film will not take any side between the losers of old and the winners of today. They will eventually all go their own ways but with the same convertible and one girl will be replaced by another one in the "First and Foremost, Farley Flavors' Fabulous Fast Foods Feed and Fortify families For a Fabulous Future" advertising venture, and the new one will even be better since she is a gorgeous, sumptuous, splendiferous, glorious and definitely opulent blonde. Television does not require the audience to think but only to feel good and relaxed.Some may say it is a pastiche of a TV show or even of a TV comic thriller. But it is such a good pastiche that we do believe it is the real stuff. It is a perfect imitation of a TV show and as such it is a perfect pastiche, but that does not give it any mental reflective distance. It is meant to carry your adhesion or your rejection but not to make you think in any way. You like or you dislike but to agree or disagree is not even a question.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Shock Treatment (1981) * 1/2 (out of 4) Needless sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show has Brad and Janet (now played by Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper) appearing on a game show where they become hostages for various wild antics. I'm a firm believer that sequels should never be made with the same characters as the first film unless you can get the original cast members. What happens in sequels without the original cast members is that the new actors are forced to give horrid performances because they're trying to "act" like the original actors. That's the case here as the two leads come off horribly bad but that's not the films only problem. The songs are incredibly dull and the entire story is pointless and lazy. I'm not exactly sure what they were going for here but it fails on pretty much all levels. We can debate the merits of the original film but it's certainly a lot better than this thing.